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Sally Yates

Former acting U.S. attorney general

The face of institutional resistance

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President Donald Trump’s arrival in Washington to begin his promised assault on the federal leviathan had the quality of a classic Hollywood western. Tension had been building after his threats to dismantle, depopulate, override and otherwise hobble the administrative state. The only plot questions were the location of the showdown and who would wear the sheriff’s badge. It happened on a Friday night, exactly one week after the inauguration, when the Trump administration issued a travel ban that blocked entry to the United States for anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Sally Yates, the acting attorney general—the person who would decide how the Justice Department would respond to the legal challenges that were sure to come—learned of the executive order not from the White House, but from her deputy as she rode to the airport for a flight to Atlanta. Using in-flight Wi-Fi, she searched for a copy of the order. On Monday, after a weekend of debate with her staff, she concluded that the order violated the establishment clause of the Constitution because “it was based on religion,” not public safety, and she instructed her department not to defend it in court.

Yates, a 56-year-old career prosecutor almost anonymous outside the Justice Department, instantly became the face of institutional resistance, the first sacrificial hero to the beleaguered townspeople of the Washington bureaucracy. #ThankYouSally trended on Twitter. She was compared to Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. Later, she would tell theNew Yorker: “Resignation would have protected my own personal integrity, because I wouldn’t have been part of this, but I believed, and I still think, that I had an obligation to also protect the integrity of the Department of Justice.”

Some, while applauding her ethics, chided her insubordination. But in early May, when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Yates absorbed question-wrapped-in-a-lecture treatment from senators like Ted Cruz and parried them with statute and precedent that became viral video clips. Her sheriff’s badge perhaps glinted most brightly when she reminded John Cornyn, the Republican senator from Texas, of a promise she had made to him during her confirmation hearing. “You specifically asked me in that hearing that if the president asked me to do something that was unlawful or unconstitutional … would I say no?” Yates said. “I made a determination that I believed that [the travel ban] was unlawful. … That’s what I promised you I would do, and that’s what I did.” —Bill Duryea

Illustrations by Joel Kimmel. Lead photo by Melissa Golden for Politico Magazine.